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Library of The Theological Seminary 
PRINCETON - NEW JERSEY 
DAKE 


FROM THE LIBRARY OF THE 
REVEREND JESSE HALSEY, D.D. 


PS 3500 .Al 154 1924 


In the shadow 


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INC PHE | 
SHADOW 





NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1924 


CoPpyRIGHT, 1924, 
BY 


HENRY HOLT AND OOMPANY 


PRINTED IN 
UNITED STATES OF AMERIOA 


VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC. 
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK 


TO ALL 
IN SICKNESS OR IN HEALTH 


UPON WHOM THE SHADOW OF SORROW FALLS 


’ AG (Pes ies \ 
h ae Vag, 
Ve wn My , F yy : 


‘ 


PAT AD 
Py bused a sf haut 
7 Bie lf, eee a 





‘Lord, he whom Thou lovest is sick.’’ 





IN THE SHADOW 





UNE 23.—Yesterday will always be a 
J marked day in my memory. For yes- 

terday I found out. Now there will 
be no more uncertainty. Yesterday was like 
the clanging of a dreadful gate, shutting me 
out from all sweet, hopeful, changeful, misty 
uncertainties. Yesterday brought me _ out 
alone into a place so narrow, so small, so 
terribly enclosed that there is no room left for 
uncertainty. 

Of course I knew I had been very ill. But I 
was supposed to be getting well again. Every 
one spoke as if I were getting well again. 
‘Now I wonder if they believe it, or if they 
know and pretend. But whether they know or 
not, they will not tell me. The biggest things 
in life remain untold until they are experienced. 
Perhaps this is humility. People trust the 
merciful laws that govern experience more than 
they trust their own wisdom. Or perhaps they 
do not trust, but are afraid, and imagine a dull 
indifference descends like a fog and blots the 
darksome reality out of sight. 

T 


2 IN FREES See Ea 


There is no fog between me and the reality 
Iifaces 

The laws that govern experience do not seem 
to me merciful, but dark and cruel. 

I got up at eleven yesterday, because it 
seemed an outrage to lie in bed on such a day 
of glorious midsummer. It was unbelievable, 
with such a golden sun, high in a sky so blue 
and with such a garden wooing it and awaiting 
me downstairs, that I could really want to stay 
in bed. 

I dressed and went down to the lawn, where 
a long chair with a canopy had been placed for 
me. 

I took a writing-pad and a book and a work- 
bag with me, and they stayed companionably 
on the grass beside me, while I lay back on my 
cushions, waiting to see what I should, pres- 
ently, feel inclined to do. 

I thought that June and sunshine and sun- 
caught grass and climbing roses on the walls 
of home and bird-calls and humming insects 
would come very near to me, and gather me 
into a sweet and kindly rest, on a living heart 
of summer, and give me ease and lull away the 
weary pressure upon my heart. 

But they left me alone. They were all quite 


IN THE SHADOW 3 


near me. I could lift my eyes and see them. 
But they did not see me. They went about 
their glorious tasks and left me outside all 
their sweetness. 

And instead, I felt as if another companion- 
ship was pressing itself upon me, a sinister, in- 
sistent neighbour, determined to break in upon 
my loneliness and make me listen. It was like 
some one trying to lure me out of open fields, 
where a festival was being held, to draw me 
into a dark room and tell me a dreadful secret. 

I thought of getting up and going to the 
rose-bed opposite me, and gathering some of 
the shell-pink roses to tempt the summer to 
come to me. But the rose-bed was the width 
of the lawn away, and how far away that 
seemed. I could hardly remember a time when 
the width of the lawn was not a long way 
for my tired feet to go. I tried to feel my- 
self the person who had once come and gone 
across the lawns and down the paths of this 
garden and along the road beyond the garden 
and far into the streets of the town, taking it 
all as the commonplace of the day, singing no 
rapt Te Deum for the splendour of it. But 
I and that person had parted company, and 
she would not tell me how she felt. 


4 IN THE SHADOW 


At half-past one, when my heart had begun 
the different thanksgiving it has lately learned 
at the thought of the shelter and silence of my 
afternoon rest, the blast of a motor-horn 
sounded from the road, a motor-car turned in 
at the gates. I knew it, of course. How of- 
ten I have been so glad to see it. It brought 
the dearest friends in the world, and they had 
come across two counties to see me. 

They were out of the car before I was off 
my chair. 

They were across the lawn before I had 
time to make a step forward. 

But not before I knew, with a pitiful, lonely, 
anguished pang, that I was not glad to see 
them and that I wished they had not come. 

They folded me in kind arms and took my 
hands in strong clasps. ‘They told me how 
sorry they were that I had been ill and how 
glad they were I was so much better. They 
said the sunshine and the fresh air were the 
very thing to set me up, and they hoped I was 
always in the garden all day long. ‘They told 
me they had books and magazines and straw- 
berries and peaches in the car for me, and they 
drew me over the lawn, with arms linked into 


IN THE SHADOW 5 


mine, that they might bestow all these chosen 
treasures upon me. 

They were far more dear than they had 
ever been before. They were dear in a way 
that somehow wounded me. ‘There came an 
ache into my heart and tears into my eyes, and 
I felt myself pierced with a new, strange sor- 
row, just because they were so utterly, terri- 
bly precious and because I was so amazed and 
grateful that they should be my friends. 

So I could not tell them I was not glad to see 
them. I could not even tell myself that 
friends so beloved, coming so far and so kindly 
to see me, were bringing me, like bitter gifts, 
only pain, frustration, sorrow. My heart 
yearned with a troubling, helpless yearning for 
the white bed upstairs, for the enclosing walls, 
the silence, the separation, the solitude. But 
I could not say so, even to myself. 

So there was nothing to do but to talk a 
great deal and make a great many protesta- 
tions and be overwhelmingly reassuring about 
my recovery, and trust to the little fevers and 
excitements that have waited upon me so 
readily lately to make a perilous bridge over 
the threatening afternoon. 


6 IN THE SHADOW 


Every one else in the house was really glad 
to see the beloved friends, and every one said 
what a pleasure it must be to me. I, too, said 
so, over and over again. After lunch we sat 
out on the lawn and talked of all that had been 
done by the two families and in the two coun- 
ties since we met last, and all that was still to 
be planned for the coming autumn and winter. 
And I heard myself saying stupid or tactless 
or untrue or meaningless things, and I heard 
my tongue tripping over my words, and I did 
not seem able to help doing either. 

Yet I pressed them to stay. I could not 
bear to have them go. I was far away from 
them. I had nothing to do with the things of 
which they talked. I had to go away—into a 
dark room—to be told a dreadful secret. But 
the fevers and excitement and tumult of heart 
and brain made it easiest to go on talking, to 
talk down the shadowy secret, to talk away the 
hours that must come. 

After we had had tea on the lawn their car 
came again. ‘They said the kindest good-byes 
and pressed many invitations upon me, and | 
stood in the doorway and watched the car turn 
out of the gates and disappear from the white 
road. 


IN THE SHADOW 7 


Then I went up to my room. 

But there was no silence there now, no sep- 
aration, no solitude. 

The troubled, difficult, teasing day came 
with me. The voices and the eyes and the 
hands, the efforts and endurances and exhaus- 
tions that had been the fabric of the day, were 
still round me, entangling me, pressing me, 
tiring me. Foolish things said hurt my brain. 
Wise things left unsaid wounded my heart. 
Phantom things became real. Real things 
changed to phantoms. Rest was an impossi- 
bility, peace was unimaginable. 

A tray was placed by my bedside. I tried 
to eat, but when I tried I broke down, instead, 
into terrible weeping. 

The weeping told me half the dreadful 
secret. I wept because the dearest friends in 
all the world had come to see me and their 
kindness had brought me only pain. From 
henceforward, when the joys of life ap- 
proached me, I must raise my hands and fend 
them off, because my weakness makes of them 
an anguish. ‘Then it was I knew myself an 
alien thing, sent out alone from the old, happy 
circles, turning blindly, wretchedly, to silences, 
separations, solitudes, removed from beloved, 


8 IN THE SHADOW 


familiar, sweet and normal days, snapping my 
ties one by one, entering upon a life unknown, 
ominous, dark—afraid of it—hating it—won- 
dering how long it will last—wondering how 
life can renew again. 

My weeping brought me sleep, but at mid- 
night I woke, and the midnight told me the 
rest of the dreadful secret. 

It will last until the end! 

The life upon which I enter now is the only 
life, after this, for me. I shall know no other 
again. 

Upon my heart was a weight of suffering 
that was not pain, but worse than pain. ‘There 
was no light at all in the room, and the dark- 
ness was so heavy and thick it pressed on me 
like an unloving presence. I was alone with 
the dim, threatening thing that had come 
nearer day by day, that had awaited me in 
every hour and changed everything I knew and 
loved, and made me, so often, so much afraid. 
I knew and named the illness that had laid its 
clutch upon me. 

Oh, anguish of separation, oh, agony of de- 
sire! Dreadful and terrible, how dark it 
looked. ‘There was no way out. A helpless 
victim, I must await its onslaughts, endure its 


IN THE SHADOW 9 


thefts. I must travel deeper into silence, fur- 
ther into the unknown. I should have no 
strength to play a part. I should have no gifts 
to bring the days. I should have no power to 
win response. One by one would go from me 
all I had gained of work and friends and duties. 
The tender mists that gather upon long-famil- 
lar things and ways would all be gone. I was 
in a region of different laws, of new initiations. 

Was it a region of laws at all, or only of 
loss, of chaos, of the destruction of all things? 
Everything looked like an illusion, except the 
awful thing I faced. ‘That rose up and struck 
its blow upon my heart. All else was decep- 
tion, a mirage of habit, a mistake of familiarity. 

I looked round—round the room—round my 
heart. ‘There was no support. Creeping 
black fear crawled upon my heart. 

Then exhaustion came and stunned me to 


sleep. 


The day dawned in slow heat. When I 
opened my eyes the hot rays were shining on 
the pretty silver and pretty glass upon my 
dressing-table. Outside was what might once 
have been a splendid summer day. 

Perhaps I ought to say my prayers. It 


10 IN THE SHADOW. 


would seem the right thing for a person like 
me. But I cannot say my prayers. I can no 
more say my prayers than I can do any other 
thing that belongs to the life being taken away _ 
from me. 

Perhaps, after all, it is not true. I should 
like to get up and find out if it is true. But I 
cannot get up. 

The little teapot beside my bed is more con- 
soling than any prayer or any hope. When 
people come in, they say, “You must just lie 
quietly all day,” as if they were offering me 
the supreme gift of life. It makes me want 
to be rude, but it is all they can give me. I 
should be glad they give it kindly. 

The sweetness of morning, then the glory 
of noon, fill the world outside as if with a mir- 
aculous Presence. 

From my window I can see the green, undu- 
lating sward, upon which never a cloud shadow 
lies to-day. There is wild thyme in its hollows 
and the heavy, scented heads of white clover. 
Beyond it is a cornfield with a fringe of scarlet 
poppies, beside the corn, a wood. ° I think I 
never knew how golden corn can be, how scar- 
let are poppies, how many shades of green a 


IN THE SHADOW II 


wood can hold. I never knew how they could 
wear the sun like a garment. 

On one of the green banks, where there 
must be wild thyme growing, a girl and a man 
are sitting together, the girl in a pretty white 
dress and a wide hat and a scarlet sunshade, the 
man in a pale summer suit. 

It is morning and noon with them, life at 
its height, life at its glory. ‘Theirs is the re- 
sponse of heart to heart, of voice to voice. 
Theirs is the sunshine, the magic of day, the 
wild thyme, the poppies and the clover, Day 
and sunshine and life are round them—keeping 
them so safe. 

Never again. Never again. 

Youth, morning, sweet airs, happy un- 
counted hours, the tender, unmeasured dower 
of the day—mine once—but never again. 

Wild thyme and white clover—the flare of 
poppies in the corn, the belt of trees—the 
maze—the splendour, the intoxication of the 
sun—incense of summer scents—music of sum- 
mer sounds—hands out to hands—eyes meet- 
ing eyes 

To give it up! To give it up! 

To lie here and see and know—and feel no 





12 IN THE SHADOW 


magic wake within to answer—alien—rejected 
—beyond reach—with empty, unresponsive 
hands and heart bereft of all but pain—can it 
be borne? 

Oh, hosts of those who suffered before me— 
tell me this—can it be borne? 


June 30.—My chair was placed near the 
rose-bed to-day. My hands could touch the 
roses, and kind hands had gathered the love- 
liest and laid them on the rug that covered me. 
The other, growing roses were very near. But 
they were not real. Weakness will not re- 
spond to sight, nor scent, nor touch. ‘The 
roses that grow in the garden are no longer 
in my world. They thrill to a lost rhythm. 
The music within me that once could answer 
them is still. My heartstrings now are all 
tuned to a single note, they can sound only un- 
der one touch. It is the touch of the secret I 
learnt in the dark. It is denial. It is re- 
nouncement. Scentless roses—distant beauty 
—the bond that once made them mine is riven. 
The yielded beauty, the foregone sweetness, 
pierced with vision, poignant with pain, that I 
know in the yearnings of deprivation, are more 
real, are a more intimate possession. 


IN THE SHADOW 13 


July 2.—How can one live these days of 
futile suffering, fallen spirit, broken soul? To 
live in the midst of a lost kingdom that yet is 
not withdrawn, but rises around one like a 
phantom city, offering no entrance, nor any 
shelter, how can one meet the days? If I 
might go back but for one hour and know the 
days again as once I knew them, and give to 
that miracle of experience the worship that is 
its meed, then I think I could come back and 
be where now I am and endure and not repine. 
And yet, it could not be. Never is life lived as 
vision sees it, across the gulf of final renuncia- 
tion. Sacrifice has burned away all the rebel- 
lion, all the doubt. ‘The joy of it runs through 
the earth like the breath of God. 


July 3.—Kindness laps my life like the lap- 
ping of warm seas about a derelict ship. The 
kindness would like to bear me back to my lost 
kingdom. But I am derelict, and every power 
is lost. I feel the warm seas lapping about 
my desolation but I cannot sail upon them and 
reach the kingdom that was once mine. 


July 20.—Across two counties once again 
came the dearest friends in the world. But 


14 IN THE SHADOW 


this time warning of their intention had come 
before them and my chair was not on the lawn. 
An atmosphere of protection and of shelter had 
grown up, intangible, invisible, but strong, be- 
tween me and them. I heard the car come up 
the drive from the gates. It seemed like a car 
arriving a long, long way from where I was. 
They were unconvincing sounds. Then I 
heard the beloved, familiar voices. They 
were strong and happy voices when they 
reached me from the garden, but when I heard 
them in the house, with footsteps going past 
my door, they were hushed and careful, and 
carried that faint furtiveness that is fear of 
wounding me, but wounds me all the more by 
the desolation that is my heart’s reply to it. 

They came to me later, but no impetuosity 
bore them towards me now. Rather they 
made of their entrance a portentous thing, 
weighted with gentleness, burdened with con- 
cern. The voices that spoke to me were 
measured, calculated, and yet uncertain, as if 
they had no sure gauge to guide them nor knew 
against what their measure was: pressed. 
They spoke kindly and encouragingly, as if to 
a child, yet they looked wistfully, searchingly, 
as if at an initiate. Then, sitting at my bed- 


IN THE SHADOW 5 


side, they told me of wonderful cures, and of 
the amazement of great doctors at wonderful, 
unlooked-for recoveries. Their dear wish 
tried to lift my heart towards hope. That 
the hope is not a true hope nor can ever have 
fulfilment does not trammel their purpose, 
which is that there shall be hope in my heart, 
and so the burden of my hopelessness be some- 
what eased from theirs. 

They do not give me hope, and yet they fill 
my mind with excited thoughts that carry me 
over the hours and give me little mental props 
at which to clutch and so keep at bay the en- 
croaching, terrible, crowding thoughts that 
wait for me at every awakening, and press so 
heavily all day upon my heart. 


August 20.—Life flamed in me to-day, a 
fever that would not be stilled. It was an 
intoxication to be poised on the brink of dan- 
ger. It was a thrilling adventure to snatch an 
hour’s excitement from that perilous denial 
that has engulfed so much. So when after- 
noon came, bringing great heat and kindly 
pleas on loving voices, I got up and dressed 
in one of the pretty pale dresses I chose with 
such reckless hope in early summer, and I went 


16 IN THE SHADOW 


down, into the sunshine, to the chair upon the 
lawn. 

There were others on the lawn to-day. At 
a little distance, so that I should not be tried 
and tired, white-clad forms were flitting, and I 
could see the gorgeous stripes of University 
blazers bright against the sun-softened green. 
I could hear voices, murmurous and absorbed, 
and the tap-tap of croquet balls. Across the 
flower-beds I could see the grey curves of the 
croquet hoops, clear and fine against the vivid 
lawn. I could see the white-clad, moving 
figures, the white-shod, moving feet. ‘There 
was a tea-table in the shade of trees, and about 
it, a group of beloved people. 

How can I have said that life was far away? 
It is so near that it is a wound. It pierces 
through defences that are no longer potent 
against it, and reaches a remoteness in me that 
receives it in pain and cries out against it, and 
yet cannot pluck it out and cast it away. 

It is August, and all the thoughts that belong 
to August are stabbing me. And August is 
hurrying past me, leaving me none of its trea- 
sures. Pictures of the heather rise up before 
me—the pungent, mysterious banks of purple 
heather—the little brilliant bells of the ling 


IN) PIES HA D OW. 17 


that I see always wearing the raindrops.  Pic- 
tures of the brown streams, breaking into 
golden foam against wet boulders, come to me, 
and the music of the running water sings and 
moans in my ears, so that I feel if I could hear 
it once again I should understand it for ever 
and be consoled. Pictures of golf-links come, 
of putting-greens where a little, white, magic 
ball, breathlessly watched, finds an enchanted 
way straight to an exquisite disappearance— 
then again bringing a perfect response to de- 
sire in a triumphant ascent into the blue air, 
conquering distance, calling such thoughts of 
freedom, such uplifted impulses, to follow its 
wonderful way. And with the pictures, what 
poignant memories of the gay comradeship of 
holiday places and the shared, happy adven- 
ture of skill. All the sharp angles, all the cold 
definitions, are hidden by the happy mist that 
is pleasure. ‘The holiday steps are such glad, 
free steps. 

The pictures and the memories and the re- 
grets stabbed me, and all the time the voices 
called in the garden around me and the tap-tap 
of the croquet balls went on, with little inter- 
rupting disharmonies of china against china 
from the tea-table. Then the pictures fell 


18 IN DHE SHADOW 


away, into forgetfulness, and only these things 
were real, and they confused and tired me. 
But I did not want to escape into solitude. I 
felt as if I were running a race against a soli- 
tude that was trying to overtake me, running 
a race with delay for the only prize. 

But when the hush of deepening afternoon, 
that can be so wonderful, but to-day seemed so 
cold and hard, came creeping in long shadows 
over the lawn, I lost the race. Wherever I 
was, there was only solitude. I left the lawn 
and came up through the quiet house to my 
room, alone. 

It was very quiet there, far away from life. 
There was no inviting comfort awaiting me. 
Even the bed and the pillows and the deep 
easy-chairs chilled me with refusal. 

Then suddenly I knew again. 

One may not know once for all. That 
knowledge comes again and again, and every 
time it is new. 

Darkness—a malign touch—caught my 
heart and my mind, caught me terribly, all of 
me. I was alone with malignity—with de- 
struction. I was alone with approaching de- 
struction that approached to destroy me. 
Slowly, hour by hour, to destroy me and all the 


IN THE SHADOW 19 


dear things I know and love. To destroy the 
fabric of my life—tearing it away. To des- 
troy it utterly—and me. 

Every resistance, every endurance, every 
watchfulness, broke me. Over me swept the 
dark tide of hopelessness, of misery. Under 
it I tossed, a nameless, broken thing, under the 
weight of it, the destroying weight of it—cast 
out and alone—broken and alone—far, far 
down—alone and unreachable. 

Not unreachable! No words could reach 
me, but a presence did. AQ little, warm and 
fluffy life had leaped determinedly and with 
impassioned eagerness upon me. A little, 
warm and fluffy life, quivering with concern 
and determination, had flung every power with 
which God had endowed it upon me—to serve, 
to bless and to console. A little dog. Com- 
passion reaching me through that little eager 
life, reaching me unspoiled by word, by curi- 
osity, by busy brain with a tale to gather and 
tell. Weak, protecting hands that hid weep- 
ing eyes were pushed away by a strong, deter- 
mined, little black muzzle—a little, warm, 
roseleaf tongue caressed and caressed, deter- 
mined, filled with a single aim, little tender 
whines crooned, breaking the dark silence, a 


20 IN \THE SHADOW 


fluffy, vigorous, squirrel-tail wagged, wagged 
in unconquerable hope. 

Healing came. How could one repulse that 
message? Hope came. How could one dis- 
believe such love? ‘The Angel of Compassion 
chose his instrument well. The little sweet 
Obedience, that had been created a little Pe- 
kingese dog, had borne his word faithfully to 
me. My desolation broke under that unmea- 
sured, impassioned sympathy that I had not 
asked, nor looked for. 


August 21.—I wondered to-day what conso- 
lation is. Were health suddenly mine again 
that would not be consolation, but reparation. 
Yet consolation is real and has its own strange 
sweetness—so sweet and so strange that one 
would not like to have passed through life and 
never known it. For it depends upon no con- 
dition nor circumstance. It lives only by its 
own mystery. There is something indestruc- 
tible and immutable about it, as if it welled 
up from eternity, so that, blessed by it, one 
comes to feel that at the heart of eternity is 
an abiding reassurance. . 

Summer is over now. ‘There is always one 


IN THE SHADOW 21 


day when summer gathers up her gifts and 
vanishes. One wakes up in the morning to 
find autumn in possession. It has come early 
this year, and the autumn transformation is ap- 
parent in everything. ‘The trees, meeting the 
wind, rustle with a sharper note. ‘The tex- 
ture of the air has changed. All the colours 
glow differently. The light falls differently. 
The skies look different. ‘There are different 
scents in the air. Yesterday it was summer. 
To-day it is autumn. It is a curious sharp- 
ening—like a warning, and yet it is an 
enchantment. 

And all this I knew again to-day, in a sudden 
moment of freedom and response. ‘Then the 
door closed once more upon all the exquisite, 
inexplicable, piercing impressions the pageant 
of this earth can so wonderfully make upon us. 

I am glad it is autumn. ‘The message of 
autumn seems nearer to me. I want to be 
away from here, once again with the streets 
and trafic of town around me—where the 
world will have a sterner aspect—and there 
will be no invitations to pleasure that now are 
to me not lures, but denials. We misunder- 
stood each other, this summer and I. I 


22 IN THE SHADOW 


thought some of its gifts were for me, but they 
were not. But I know what autumn promises, 
and I know that autumn will keep its promise. 


September 29.—Summer, with all its broken 
hopes, is left behind. I am back again in the 
house in a town. I think the journey that 
brought me back had less unrest of thought 
than the journey that carried me away. 

My room is high above a highroad that is an 
entrance into the city and all day long and far 
into the night the traffic passes. The corn- 
field, the poppies, the trees, seem far away. 
They live in my mind like a picture that has 
become a sorrowful language. But from this 
window in the town I can look further than 
I could from that country window. ‘The road 
curves away after passing this house, and there 
are belts of gardens in my vision, and where 
the road curves again, houses stand high above 
a valley. When I lie awake I can see the grey 
dawn quiver behind the housetops and change 
to the rose of sunrise. I can see the house- 
lights gleam out like beacons when darkness 
approaches. I can see the golden glow start 
into the great windows of a church when it is 
time for evening service. At night the lamps 


IN THE SHADOW 23 


of the motors throw their light right across my 
pillows, and for a long minute all my room is 
bright. 

What eagerness went with old returns! 
What anticipations! What reunions! ‘There 
is nothing to plan now. I think it is better to 
be here than in the country. There are work- 
ers in the city. Pain and work have some- 
thing in common, but pain and holiday must be 
for ever at variance. 

I face the final changelessness now. Nothing 
can happen to vary it. Yet every morning it is 
new. Every morning when the door opens 
and my tray is carried in and I am left alone 
again, the tears flood up to throat and eyes, 
and I cannot hold them back, nor face with any 
courage the denying day that stretches before 
me so interminably. 

There are fewer people in this house. I 
hear fewer footsteps passing through it. Few 
voices break the silence. Once there were 
more people. There are rooms left empty 
now. It may be that it is well. People re- 
proach me that I do not want them. I do not 
want them. I do not want myself. I want 
nothing but the blessed, black curtain of the 
night upon the tragedy that is my life. In the 


24 IN THE SHADOW 


night I am alone with my dark knowledge. It 
may be terrible and terrifying, laying a weight 
upon my heart that can never be lifted again, 
save in sleep. But at least I am hidden away 
and unreproached. No _ one _ peers into 
the heart that holds its dark secret, save © 
myself. 

As far as may be I try to gather courage. 
I remember lines of haunting poetry and I 
wonder whence they took their rise. I remem- 
ber stern, prophetic Bible phrases and I won- 
der how they came to be framed. I cling 
to the touches of sympathy that reach me, 
to the little gifts that break the hours, the 
kindly messages that break my thoughts. 
They are sometimes so unexpected, and come 
to me from sources that would have seemed to 
me the last to which I might look for remem- 
brance and for understanding. Yet I can 
build but a frail defence with all they give me. 

It is the everyday things—the blessed, nor- 
mal, commonplace things that torture me most 
with their desirability. I have only to picture 
myself sitting at my mirror, tying a veil about 
a hat, pulling open a drawer and taking out 
gloves—making ready to go somewhere— 
planning to go somewhere, towards some sweet 


IN THE SHADOW 25 


unknown, starting out—and with that piercing 
memory of lost, uncounted joys the dark wa- 
ters rush over me. I am ina frenzy of home- 
sickness, desolation, loneliness, lost and unsup- 
ported in a chaos of nothingness, with that 
strange awfulness of seeming to inhabit no 
place in time or in eternity. 

And there is no relief. With bruised heart 
and ceaseless aching desire I must meet that 
returning agony. I must fight the fight over 
again. I must reconquer that great weakness 
that fastens me with its strange piercings to my 
helplessness. 

By day I must endure. 

By night I must wake and remember. By 
day and night my thoughts must meet and face 
it. here is nothing else to face. Yet I feel 
like one who waits. Trembling, troubled, 
wistful, I feel like one who waits. For what 
can I wait? 


October 2.—I woke in the night. It was 
not long after midnight, long for patience if 
sleep was not to return. ‘he pressure was 
heavy on my heart. I raised myself on my 
piled pillows to face the blow and the crushing 
of my prison-place. 


26 IN THE SHADOW 


But there was no blow and there was no 
prison. 

Light flickered in the room from the lamps 
in the street. The flash of motors came and 
went as they approached and passed and dis- 
appeared. There were sounds of footsteps. 
and voices from the pavement. But they were 
far away, calling to no response from me. 
They had fallen far away from me with those 
enclosing prison bands that had held me, and 
that now had broken about me and set me free. 

All the prison, all the penning pressure had 
gone. The place in which I was set was no 
longer narrow, but wide—oh, wide—wider 
than any place I have ever known. Doors had 
been flung open. I never knew there were 
such doors to open or to close. And every 
door was open upon such exquisite, tremulous 
joy that just to be still and to receive it was 
more than life had ever taught me to desire. 
Straight before me, it seemed, one wonderful 
door had been flung wide and a wonderful path 
stretched, purple with sweet shadows, dim and 
beautiful and fragrant, with sheltering walls on 
either side of it, and at the end—Light—Life 
—a Presence—oh, Life and Presence such as 
never reached my consciousness before—that 


IN THE SHADOW 27 


called to me, that knew my name—that knew 
my name and called to me as I have never 
been known nor called before. 

“The way to me is still the same.” 

Did I hear the words? They rang in my 
ears asif | had heardthem. ‘They lived in my 
memory as if they had been spoken in my 
room. My heart mounted as if on wings. 
There was no loss at all in all the universe. 
Life met me—life that was beauty, tenderness, 
endowment, and I saw a path that no denial 
could ever take from me. Suddenly there was 
flung upon me so deep and near a kinship with 
all the world that the kingdom of life I thought 
I had lost ran back into my heart with near- 
ness indescribable. ‘There was no longer any 
difference, nor any separation, nor any solitude. 
I knew, nor felt, nor endured nothing that all 
the world did not share with me. I saw the 
whole world knowing imprisonment, limitation, 
mutability, facing conditions that frustrate and 
deny. And I knew that no life is free till un- 
known, unguessed-at freedom breaks upon it, 
answering its inmost desire. And that Way 
never changes—never closes—in all the world. 

Then Joy passed through my room and 
filled it. Joy after joy passed through my 


28 LN THE SHADOW 


room and bore me upward, onward. ‘The 
bonds that had crushed me had gone—or had 
they changed? I knew unbreakable bonds with 
every heart in the whole world, and with the 
Heart of Creation—with that perfect Pres- 
ence—that perfect Life. 

I did not want to sleep. I wanted to lie 
awake and remember. But blessed sleep that 
was like sheltering wings descended upon me 
and I did not wake till morning. 


When my door opened and my tray was 
put at my bedside, and I was left alone again, 
I did not weep. Had I wept it would have 
been with thanksgiving for the rapturous joy 
that waited for me in my room. ‘To lie here 
for a lifetime would not be too long if I might 
wait upon such joy again. 

It dwells in everything. Everything is 
near, but as if I made my approach to it by a 
different door, and new tendrils reached out to 
entwine me and hold me in a precious close- 
ness. Up the curving road the workers are 
making their way towards the city. I feel as 
if I knew why they are going and why they 
work, but I cannot tell myself all my knowl- 
edge. I feel as if I had my part in a wonder- 


IN THE SHADOW 29 


ful destiny that holds me with them in the 
circle of its promise. And they are all so dear 
—the workers, the children, the traffic, the 
houses on the cliff, the church with the great 
windows. And I am rich because I may lie 
here and see them and think of them. 


October 5.—I do not need to seek for cour- 
age for these days. There is no courage 
needed. ‘The hours come towards me bringing 
me thoughts, and with their help I seek new 
knowledge, and I have joy for a companion. 
I do not need to wonder where the haunting 
poems take their rise, nor where the stern, pro- 
phetic texts were framed. I know. I have 
seen the region where they have their source. 

And yet—what happened in that night? 

Was it a dream, born of sickness and weak- 
ness and solitude? I have dreamed often. 
This was not a dream. 

I think I must have heard all the morning 
stars sing together and all the sons of God 
shout for joy. 


October 11.—I lost a kingdom that I loved 
and the loss seemed terrible and irreparable. 
Now another kingdom has grown up around 


30 IN THE SHADOW 


me, or perhaps a hidden kingdom has become 
visible, like fairy-tale palaces and castles. All 
the lure of fairy tales lay in the emergence of 
wonders that were usually invisible, and in 
speech from things that were usually silent. 
Of course there have always been hidden 
kingdoms. ‘There is one in every heart. We 
see and we touch and we move amongst all 
the intricate and fascinating things that make 
up the glory of life, but it is from the hidden 
heart-kingdom rises the delight, the rapture, 
the sorrow, the frustration that are no less 
part of life. From that kingdom, too, come 
the desires that nothing in life can satisfy. 
And now, when the outer life has fallen from 
me like a husk, I am discovering reaches in that 
hidden kingdom of which I could not even 
dream. It is as if yet another kingdom, in- 
visible and great, invited us as deeply as ever 
the outer world could invite us, and is able to 
awaken raptures and delights, sorrows and 
frustrations as absorbing and varied as those 
I lose daily. All my treasures of joy and mem- 
ory I take out of the darkness that has gath- 
ered about them, and I repossess them in the 
new kingdom. ‘There are some things—a few 
things—oh, the most precious, the most be- 


IN THE SHADOW © 31 


loved secret things—memories that are sweeter 
than other memories, eyes that told me more 
than other eyes, voices that carried treasures 
to me that were more than any word or tone 
—these come to me again, sweeter, nearer, 
more unassailably mine, from the very heart of 
the invisible kingdom. I have not lost them 
with the life I regretted most because it seemed 
to me they must go with it. ‘They never be- 
longed to it. They came to me, always, from 
the invisible kingdom, and that is why they 
were so dear. It may be that love takes its 
rise, like haunting poetry and prophetic Bible 
words, from eternity, and that eternity is the 
soul of life, and of all life’s most precious 
things. 


October 19.—Some one came to my room 
to-day whom I have not seen before. I did not 
want to see him. More than once I[ have 
found a convincing excuse to refuse to see him. 
I have found equally convincing excuses 
against many entrances lately, for I have grown 
very weary of futile advice and insincere op- 
timism. There is such solitude in trying to 
smile and to listen and to answer people who 
try to relieve, not my oppression, but their 


32 IN THE SHADOW 


own, with little invented phrases. The advice 
and the optimism turn rapidly to chiding if 
that relief fails them. So I had only dread 
for some one untried and unknown, who wore 
the collar and cloth that might give the advice 
and the optimism and the chiding a wider 
range in which to wound and weary. But 
dread has lately gone out of fashion in my 
little high room, and adventure has taken its 
place, so a visitor came in who had never come 
in before. 

He did not ask me any questions. He gave 
me no advice, nor had he many inventions in 
optimism to which I must listen. He seemed 
able to face, with perfect equanimity, a person 
who will never again be well, and to retain an 
atmosphere of most amazing joy he bore about 
him, and which unmistakably entered my room 
with him. He had not come to relieve op- 
pression, but to share joy. He had not come 
to advise but to serve. ‘I have been waiting 
for weeks to know what I could do for you,” 
he said. “If you had been in a hospital I 
would have known how to find my way to you. 
Being where you are, I could only stand on 
your doorstep until you let me in.” He came 
further into my solitude than I ever thought 


IN THE SHADOW _ 33 


any one could when he said that. It touched 
me, who have been so desolate, that some one, 
unknown to me, waited to serve me. It made 
me feel that out in the world, as in my lonely 
room, are undivined, ungathered joys, and we 
raise barriers to them, as we raise barriers to 
the joys of God. “Would you have stood 
very much longer?” I asked him. ‘‘At in- 
tervals, I should have stood till the stones wore 
through, or the police removed me, or old age 
crippled me,” he answered. “Then you don’t 
disapprove of people who can never be well?” 
I asked him. ‘“They are part of my work 
when they allow me to help,” he said. “I am 
glad to be just an ordinary person again,” I 
said. 

‘‘There is no such thing as an ordinary per- 
son,’ was his answer. ‘‘Just as in all the 
forests there are no two leaves alike. But as 
far as everything essential is concerned, there 
is little difference between the person who is 
well and the person who may never again be 
well. The really desirable things remain in 
exactly the same place.” 

It was strange he should have said that. 

“There are privileges in being drawn out of 


the crowded ways. It is delightful to find how 


34 IN THE SHADOW 


convincing the desirable things become. Nor 
do you have to spend so much time dealing 
with a worldful of people apt to get incensed 
against you, and to provide you with uninspir- 
ing occupations. ‘My mother’s sons were in- 
censed against me. ‘They made me keeper of 
the vineyards. But mine own vineyard have 
I not kept.’ No one can try here, to draw 
you back into the world’s vineyards.” 

I had not expected the wonderful, impas- 
sioned, beautiful Song of Songs to come sing- 
ing its way into my room like this. Until now 
such very different texts have been thought 
suitable. 

He knelt at my bedside and said prayers be- 
fore he went away. He did not say them be- 
cause he thought them suitable, but because, 
to him, they were part of the joy he had come 
to share. After he had gone, I lay and 
thought that he, too, had certainly discovered 
an invisible kingdom with magnificent reaches 
of rapture and joyousness, sorrow and tender- 
ness, and that a great deal of his time was 
spent in it. Perhaps, too, he knows some 
measure of pressure and limitation. ‘There is 
a certain prisoning in the collar and the cloth 
he wears. 


IN THE SHADOW 35 


The kingdom is infinitely worth while dis- 
covering. 

It is extraordinary rapturous to dwell in it. 

If the way to the kingdom could break upon 
me only by the piercing of pain, solitude, sor- 
row—the cost is not too great. Pain has some 
part in that mysterious region. But first pain 
is a dark angel that stands sentinel with a 
flaming sword, lest we enter and grow content 
in an Eden we have spoiled. 


November 10.—The days of mystic peace 
and joy have fled from my room. Quiet and 
solitude have fled it too. Instead, pain has 
passed through it, difficult, troubling, changing 
pain, a procession of distress. Life has had 
to fight hard to keep its hold on me. At my 
bedside there comes and goes an old Scottish 
nurse, with white hair and blue, Highland eyes. 
She brings with her something of the mystery 
of her far Highlands, some trace of the spell 
of the heather, the glens, the mountain tarns. 
Her eyes have a deeper vision than most eyes 
have. ‘They tell me deep, true things. Even 
when she tries to tell me I am going to get 
quite well, and I know I can never get quite 
well, still her eyes tell me deep, true things. 


36 IN THE SHADOW 


There are nurses (I have seen them) whose 
eyes hold nothing true to tell. Iam glad none 
of them are near me now. Where I am only 
true things can bring ease. The looks and 
words and ways that are unwinged with truth 
miss their aim here. Suffering and weakness 
are very sure of their own needs. Perhaps 
from sick people one might discover what are 
the real desires of the human spirit. There 
would be the language of eternity in every one 
of them. I love the return of dawn. The 
promise of immutability comes with it. I love 
the sound of a bell in the city. Its call in- 
vokes for me the lost magic of distance. I 
love the silence that creeps over the world with 
the coming of night. My room falls into a 
strange silence. My old nurse watches— 
watches beside me, while all the house about us 
sleeps. The mystery of watching is one of the 
mysteries of the world. All activity has died 
down. Human wills have drooped and bent 
to submission. Some strange, great Spirit has 
entered and possessed them. ‘Then watching 
becomes like the brooding of a patient 
Eternity, of an Eternal and patient Purpose. 
It is in the watching hours we know how much 


IN THE SHADOW 37 


there is to know and how little we do know. 
In them we are content not to know, but to 
wait. 


November 12.—I have looked into a region 
of horror. With inner eyes I have seen, and 
with every fibre of my being I have felt, a 
world where there is nothing but an unutter- 
ably dreadful, mechanical pulsing, that beats 
on for ever without mind, without purpose, 
without response to our hearts and minds, with 
no relationship whatever to those things we 
perpetually crave. ‘Hope, beauty, wisdom, re- 
newal, expression, love, effort, aspiration, the 
intertwining of our spirit with them all—these 
are life itself. But I had entered upon an 
agonized existence where not one of them was, 
where they were made to seem but some fool- 
ish, unreal, mocking mist, that sometimes fell 
in illusory consolation, and hid that relentless 
throb of mindless law, whose naked ruling was 
the only permanence. I longed to struggle 
against it, but I could only suffer in terror. 
No appeal could enter it. It was law, but it 
had no knowledge. It ruled, but without in- 
tent. It was cruelty, but without malice. I 


38 IN THE SHADOW 


knew myself and every living thing to be en- 
tangled in it. It convinced me utterly, and 
under it, helpless, how I suffered. 

“She is out of herself a little; the chloro- 
form has done it,” I heard my old nurse say. 

I may have been out of myself, but hidden 
heart and hidden eyes declared that region 
real. I had looked upon despair. 

Some one stood beside my bed and spoke. 
It was the Dweller in Joy, who lately came 
with joy into my joy-filled room. 

I think I caught his hand. I told him I was 
afraid. 

He knelt beside my bed and I think he 
prayed. I felt the strong touch of his hands 
On mine, and something ran into that region of 
anguish that changed the dreadful beating, and 
I remembered and believed. 

For an hour I had rest. Then again the 
dreadful places caught me. I suffered and I 
was afraid, and the Dweller in Joy had gone. 


November 18.—Deeply I slept and far away 
from all dreams. I woke in tender peace. 
Great is the relief to my tired frame, but it 
is not real peace. ‘Ihe true peace is a living 
sword that refts life’s unrest in two and frees 


IN THE SHADOW 39 


the soul, setting it amongst those things which 
are not held in the clasp of any law we know, 
and which pass all understanding. But this 
sweet lulling, this tender lapping of soft 
thought and charmed memory, this wrapping 
twilight about experience’s harshness—this is 
drug. ‘The rest it yields, and the Rest of God 
are not the same. Deeply—unmistakably— 
splendidly—they are not the same. 


December 8.—For a month I have dwelt in 
a region of shadows and silence—dwelt, a re- 
jected guest, between heaven and earth. I do 
not lift my head much, nor do the days seem 
very real. It is an inward world that is mine 
now, where I lie alone and ponder this inefia- 
ble, piteous mystery of suffering. 

What did I see—that strange and terrible 
night that filled my vision with undreamt-of 
darkness? What strange and awful law sep- 
arated me from every desire? Was it the 
“earth cursed for our sake’? Did I fall 
deeper into the forbidden laws, that clutch and 
hold us against all that within us loves and 
remembers and desires a different destiny? 
Has human nature really fallen where God 
never meant it to be? Did I see a vision of 


40 IN THE SHADOW 


life as it would be, did it remain for ever un- 
pierced by Spirit? To Spirit, then, belong all 
the divine, sweet, lovely things that fill the days 
with joy and nameless sweetness and wonderful 
fears. ‘To Spirit belongs all that we call life. 
Speech, hope, beauty, art that fashions, taste 
that chooses, the marvel we name expression 
—do they all travel to us by those magic doors 
that opened once to my yearning eyes and 
caught me into ecstasy? Did I look, that 
night of torment, upon life as it would be, were 
those doors closed for ever? 

Now, in my weakness, there comes towards 
me a winged thought, that draws me away 
from every fear. It is the thought of that 
trinity of life as we know it—of being and ex- 
pressing and feeling. We are Life, Action 
and the Mood that unites them—the Mood 
or Spirit that quickens and unites and enlarges 
them so mysteriously. That is our life—it is 
ourselves—a trinity—as God is the Holy 
Trinity. And all down the ages marvellously 
it has been proclaimed and sung that we are 
‘“‘made in His image.” 

How flamingly real looks that threefold life 
—-seen in contrast to that denying region where 
everything went to the heavy throb of cause 


IN THE SHADOW 41 


and effect. Truth is not a heavy throb. 
Truth is a flaming Trinity. 

Now for a moment—for one blessed mo- 
ment—it has seemed to me that I have ‘“‘seen 
face to face.”’ 


December 20.—‘‘The time draws near the 
birth of Christ.’ I seem to feel Christmas, 
like an approaching Presence, filling the streets 
and houses, colouring the late dawns and early 
sunsets. My thoughts do not need to seek 
Christmas. It comes to me. I know with- 
out trying that the churches are full of holly, 
that the streets are busy, that children are 
eager, that people’s thoughts are with their 
friends. Christmas gathers upon the world 
like a living thing. It is more than a custom. 
Truth waits to quicken the custom of Christ- 
mas and make it a mystic, living thing. 


December 25.—My Christmas has brought 
me gifts that break, each one, my prison bars. 
On my table are deep red and rose carnations 
glowing out of their own sharp grey-green foli- 
age. Across the little dark hollows of the 
room they shine like thoughts made visible— 
symbol of the long friendship whose faith and 


42 IN THE SHADOW 


tenderness have sent them here. Pale pink 
carnations are in another glass, with the 
feather of asparagus fern, a memory of a 
friend whose favourite flower they were, whose 
grave not long ago shone with them out of 
the snow, brought by the sister who in her 
sorrow has found time to cherish me. Violets 
I have too. My old nurse said my Christmas 
would not be complete without them. An 
embroidered box carries a written message for 
me—‘‘Where e’er you go, may flowers blow” 
—a true, dear message for my lonely room, 
where flowers are the sweetest entrance many 
of my days can know. A friend, whose touch 
is always near and wonderful, has sent me 
that mysterious, sorrowful head of Our Lord 
by Leonardo da Vinci. “The downcast eyelids 
have a wistfulness—a wistfulness that pierces, 
yet consoles. Rupert Brooke’s poems are be- 
side me. ‘‘He was always in love with some- 
thing greater than life or death,” I find written 
of him. Are we all born to be in love with 
something greater than life or death? ‘The 
poets give themselves to that love. Rupert 
Brooke gave himself twice over. Surely it was 
worth while. For even I, for a magic hour 


IN THE SHADOW 43 


in a wondrous night, have been in love with 
something greater than life or death. 


December 28.—My old Highland nurse 
knows her Bible all through, and it sets a seal 
upon her heart, a seal upon her arm. Her 
thoughts and acts leave her carrying the stamp 
of her long knowledge. I think all thoughts 
and acts bear the stamp they have received in 
those deep, hidden reaches out of which per- 
sonality springs—so much deeper in some peo- 
ple than in others, and so differently fed. 
Last night she pondered long upon the where- 
abouts of Sheba, deciding at last that it was 
Persia. ‘‘Would she be young or old, the 
Queen of Sheba, I wonder?’’ she asked me. 
“Young, of course young, or how could she 
have taken such a long journey on camels?” 
I answered. “I was thinking if she was young 
and pretty, King Solomon would never have let 
her away. But, of course, if she’d been old 
she could never have gone with all thae 
camels,’’ she said wisely. 

I wanted her to find a text for me. It had 
come into my mind suddenly. I read it in 
childhood, coming into a child’s story, “‘dnd 


44 IN THE SHADOW 


the inhabitant shall not say I am sick.” A 
calm and wonderful pity, that makes me feel 
so strangely still and so wonderfully held, 
draws me into itself with the marvel of those 
words. 

Yet it was I who found them first, coming 
upon them as I searched the many pages and 
many chapters of the Book of Isaiah. And 
the lifelong Bible-student who nurses me says 
she went to bed reluctantly, owning her fail- 
ure. “Though I searched a fair hour,” she 
says, and then adds, ‘“‘But if you’ve found them 
then it’s all right.” 


December 30.—The flowers that come into 
my room now are not like the flowers that 
grow in the gardens I remember. Scentless, 
distant, lovely, lonely—lI see them as if across | 
a chasm—as one’s thoughts of heaven used to 
be. They are like stars from a different 
sphere—mystic—inexplicable—speaking a lan- 
guage from ineffable regions. 

The rose carnations on my mantelpiece to- 
night bend and drop over the mantelshelf, so 
that the firelight catches them in its glow. 
There is only the firelight in the room. It 
moves like a living thing, and all the bright 


IN THE SHADOW — 45 


points in the room answer it. ‘There is a hush 
all around me. It creeps in every evening as 
if brooding wings descended and stilled the 
busy rhythm that is life—so that everything 
beats more softly to a changed and gentler 
tension that is very, very quiet, and yet always 
alert—always expectant. 

But now, when I watch and wait in the en- 
folding wings of that brooding sweetness, I 
know for what it is I watch and wait. 


January 5.—New Year has brought me 
fallen thoughts. In these days I have felt like 
Jephthah’s daughter—I want to push away all 
claims, all demands, and be alone to mourn the 
unfinished sadness that my life has been. 

In the street below a child is crying—crying. 

The reproach is more than I can bear. 
Who—what—is reproached by the crying of 
children? And I lie here—alone—silent—in a 
world of crying children. 


January 8.—I think there are some people 
who when there is success are called and drawn 
to share it. And there are others who are 
drawn magnetically and irresistibly to stand be- 
side failure, helplessness and unrewarded pain. 


46 IN THE SHADOW 


Of such is the old nurse who comes and goes 
at my bedside now—and because of it I shall 
love her more than any nurse I have known or 
may know. For the end is failure. Robert 
Louis Stevenson says man is not meant to suc- 
ceed. Perhaps it is God who is meant to 
succeed. So those who can stand beside fail- 
ure and gather it up into faith, reach into 
Eternity when they do it. Eternity may be 
our true success. The little, fugitive successes 
and triumphs that fly past us like summer days 
are only little symbols or prophecies. They 
are too fleeting to be anything else. 


January 20.—The snow has drifted past my 
window all day. It is white on the roofs. It 
is black and soiled in the streets. But weather 
no longer reaches me. Often I do not remem- 
ber whether winter or summer reigns outside. 
Memory itself has changed its relationship to 
my days. Yesterday, last year, six years ago, 
are equally biddable, equally remote, in my 
long hours. 

Once the darling rain beat on the windows 
and soft thoughts sprang into my heart to an- 
swer it. Once the summer mornings, blue with 
the haze of coming heat, woke passionate de- 


IN THE SHADOW) 47 


sires, and the poignant thrill of pleasure. 
Once, the mild spring winds, carrying the scents 
of the earth when it is broken by the upward 
push of growing things, full of the nameless 
lure of the earth’s renewing life, met me with 
bewildering magic and called my pulses to a 
splendid beat. The snow in sunlight had its 
own ridiculous merriment, the snow at night 
its cold, mystic enchantment. 

But now the eyes carry no message to the 
slumbering senses. ‘They gaze out of my high 
window and they see the rain and the sun, 
the snow, the blue sky and the wandering city 
smoke, but they bring none of these things to 
me. All would win a nearer place in my heart 
if I read them in a printed book. ‘The frame 
of quivering nerves and hidden senses that I 
call myself, now is tuned to a different tension. 
It is strung to a changed key. ‘The messages 
it can receive and answer strike upon finer, 
stranger wires. If I were brought to the edge 
of the sea and saw its waves breaking on the 
sand—close to my eyes, close to my touch, the 
salt pungence in the air I breathed—it would 
be no nearer to me than a painted ocean. If 
the great hills rose around me, the purple 
heather, the splash of mountain burns, the wide 


48 IN THE SHADOW 


spaces of the moor—I should see—the next 
moment I would forget that I had seen—and 
turn away, knowing, feeling, holding nothing 
—save the unchanging tension of those taut 
nerves that clasp my spirit in unyielding grasp. 

Only light still brings me its great pageant 
of changing charm and glory. The cold, 
crude gleam of winter noon, when sorrow and 
pain are hardest to bear, changes to the un- 
certain light of early gloaming. The rosy 
glow from shaded electric lamps starts up 
around me. ‘Then that is gone and there is 
only the dancing firelight. ‘The firelight fades, 
and the flickering light of street lamps, meet- 
ing the wind, crosses the deepening darkness, 
and the travelling light of the motors enters 
for a long minute, crosses my pillows and 
vanishes. ‘The lights in the windows of dis- 
tant houses go out one by one. ‘Then there 
are only the rows of street lamps edging the 
roads, the starshine, sometimes the moonshine. 

But the moonshine, when the roofs are dark 
against a white sky, and silver patches lie upon 
my floor, is part of the earth-pageant that has 
shut me out. 

When the moon’s nights come, and I re- 
member in longing the miracle of the heart’s 


IN THE SHADOW 49 


response to the moods of the lovely earth, I 
am glad that I have learnt a faith that teaches 
the Resurrection of the Body. 


January 29.—My old Highland nurse no 
longer watches beside me, and no longer is 
every morning broken by doctor’s visits. The 
days are quiet, the strange places of terror and 
revelation have retreated and memory cannot 
recall them. I am as near to normal life as 
I can ever be again. Perhaps it is not very 
near. Does any one guess the God-given 
sweetness of the normal till the dreadful pres- 
sure of the abnormal has been known? But 
into normal days I can no longer bring my 
heart. I have there no abiding city. I must 
learn to love another kingdom. 


February 2.—Friends come from time to 
time. I would like to be glad every time, but 
sometimes I am not glad at all. I think then 
the friends have not been glad to come, but 
vaguely feel a pressure as of something due. 
And then their presence is but an added soll- 
tude. They ask me questions that burden 
memory and quicken grief to answer. They 
advise me. Advice eases the giver a thousand 


50 IN THE SHADOW 


times for once it brings wisdom to the sufferer. 
And I must listen to a little patter of con- 
gratulatory phrase, of which I have learnt to 
anticipate every word. It is always delightful 
to see me so much better. It is always so cer- 
tain that I have “‘taken the turn.” Always I 
am so much stronger than I was. They would 
not take such vain repetitions to a dinner-party. 
They think because to visit the sick is new to 
them, that it must be equally new to the sick 
to be visited.. So I must listen and answer and 
try to feel grateful—grateful even for that 
strange pressure they hate and which yet is 
strong enough to bring them. And all the time 
I yearn for some echo of a larger life to 
lighten the weight of my unchanging days. At 
last they go. “You look ever so much better 
than I expected, so much better than you 
looked last time. Hurry up and get quite 
well.” ‘They all say it. 

I think that I have met the same gaucherie 
before. I think it entered nursery days, and 
was not more welcome then than now. Chil- 
dren, too, live in a world difficult for busy, un- 
pliable brains to penetrate, and busy, unpliable 
brains think no worlds so hard to enter can 


IN THE SHADOW 51 


be worth entering. Children and sick people 
share the same patronage. ‘The regions they 
inhabit are dubbed delusion. And yet the 
busiest brain takes its own rest and renewal 
from those regions of delusion—when the 
treasures of those regions are transmuted into 
poetry or play, book, music, or picture. 

But there are friends who are different. 

No pressure brings them here, and all pres- 
sures vanish with their presence. When they 
leave, all the bright spots in my life are shin- 
ing again. ‘They have set me free, once more, 
amongst them, to gather faith and hope. 
They are the true interpreters. Light is 
struck from every contact with them. In that 
light I look back, and I can see through all my 
life, the piercing touches of a sweeter life, and 
I can believe they were the touches of Heaven. 

I think the word friend has taken a new 
meaning since these friends came to this quiet 
room. 

They do not seem to remember I am ill. 
Their thoughts are not enclosed in the walls 
that enclose me. ‘Their thoughts are not the 
thoughts desire impels. They have learnt the 
thoughts that hope inspires. They wait upon 


52 INCGT RE SHADOW 


no wishes of their own, but listen to a larger 
command. It seems to me they read the 
thought that God has hidden in me. 

Now I begin to think the greatest powers 
of all wait upon a great obedience. I think 
there are wonderful laws and Presences very 
near us, waiting always to make life sacra- 
mental. 


February 9.—Sorrow of heart caught me to- 
day. Oh, for peace, for rest—deep, deep rest. 
I think only the end of life—the break of the 
eternal dawn—can bring the rest I long for. 
It is one of those days when every minute tells 
me how desolate I am, and I know, to the 
depth of knowing, how sad, lonely, tortured, 
is the thirst of my heart. All this day the 
opening of magic doors, the piercing of sacra- 
mental thoughts, the sweetness of unexpected 
emotion, all the life of the spirit, looked poor 
and thin beside the radiance of the life of the 
heart—the life I have lost for ever. 

Only to watch the heavy hours go by. 

And my life—a half-tasted cup—goes past 
me with them. And pain—the only cup of 
which I have drunk deeply—stays. 

How blessed death looks in such weariness. 


IN THE SHADOW 54 


February 10.—With the falling of night, 
once again joy entered my room. 

Tired pulses, tense, taut, suffering nerves 
felt its entrance. It came as the subtle sweet- 
ness of a hidden garden, sending fragrance 
from unseen flowers. 

I looked out at it with answering heart and 
questioning mind. How could it be real? It 
could not be. ‘The past day called to no joy. 

But I met eternal laughter in the shadows of 
my little room. Freedom entered—on eternal 
wings. It was not freedom in the little broken 
bits that scatter life. It stood beside me a 
living Presence. It caught me into itself. In 
sudden, sweet shock of infinite surprise I knew 
the caress of eternity. 

The rapture of every dawn was mine—the 
response of all young, glad, unthinking things. 
The ecstasy of the sun’s new light, striking the 
mountain-tops at sunrise—striking the crests of 
waves—caught in the rise of spray—the break 
of waves in morning silence—the scents of un- 
touched morning—these were in my heart. 
Eternal youth was in my heart, untrammelled 
by heavy thought, undarkened by trail of 
memory, but answering joy from clefts deeper 
than any youth can know. 


s4 IN THE SHADOW 


Sweetest of all was the calm, upholding 
strength like the hand of love on my heart, the 
great assurance that here was the ultimate 
reality, the eternal destiny, the infinitude of 
truth. 

Yet I could smile at the lovely thing and 
watch and question and tell myself of it, un- 
stunned by any strangeness. Nothing in all 
my life had ever been less strange. Strange- 
ness had gone for ever out of all things. I 
think I have never been myself till joy from 
out eternity came and told me what I was. 

Perfect happiness I knew—union with a 
spirit that was divine—bringing me unimagin- 
able rapture—telling me unutterable things. 


February 12.—The beauty and the freedom 
passed from out my room. Or did the little 
laws that govern life and master the body 
claim me again, and hide from me the Truth 
that never passes, nor changes, nor knows any 
shadow of variableness? It is not to be re- 
called by will or wish. But peace stays in my 
heart and deep content. Once again I can 
bring all my thoughts into light greater than 
any thought, and in that light see them grow 
wonderful. 


IN THE SHADOW 55 


I think I can never again desire anything so 
much as to gaze upon knowledge in the reveal- 
ing rapture of that greater knowledge. I 
think I can never again know denial, save the 
denial of that light. I think in all the universe 
there is no denial, save that strange denial with 
which each soul has wrapped itself about, 
wearing it like a coil of foreign darkness, alien 
both to itself and to eternity. 


February 14.—Everything moves lightly in 
my room. Day’s ritual touches me no more 
heavily than the light settling of birds pausing 
in their flight. Night comes on mystic steps 
and holds in its shadows some remembered 
fragrance of the Presence that filled the night, 
and filled my room, and filled my heart and 
spirit. I gather my thoughts into it. I 
gather my memories. I gather the sweetest 
words of poetry. For they rose out of that 
unimaginable light. In a transcendent mo- 
ment they were captured by a soul set free. 
Thus they were brought to me. 


February 25.—IThe Dweller in Joy came 
into my room to-day. 

There were hyacinths beside me, blue and 
lovely, and starry, white narcissi. 


56 IN THE SHADOW 


Their fragrance passed me by. Flowers 
shine as the stars do, from a different sphere. 
It is a cold and distant shining—serene, scent- 
less, remote. 

But the Dweller in Joy shed all his gladness 
upon me. It, too, was like the laughter of 
eternity. 

For an hour he sat at my bedside and talked 
to me. He speaks his own language, but his 
joy and his knowledge and all his thoughts 
come from the other side of the magical doors. 

As he talks, my own thoughts, too vast for 
my tired mind, fall back into the old channels. 
Bible thoughts can clasp them, can keep them 
safe. Church teaching can draw them, make 
them strong. He bears with him enfolding 
airs, like the enfolding of the Church—protect- 
ing, guiding, quickening the sweetness and the 
light and life of inner spirit. Something of 
this I told him, and the telling broke an old 
thought of a hard, unyielding convention that 
once my mind harboured and named Church. 

“But the Church is always the Bride of 
Christ,’’ he answered, “‘never the Bridegroom 
of the world.” 

When he left me, the greatest of all love- 
songs once more sangin my heart. “A garden 


IN THE SHADOW 57 


enclosed is my sister, my spouse.””’ My room 
was no longer a lonely cross. It was a garden 
awaiting the dawn. Its shadows were no 
longer of denial; they were the shadows of 
approach. 


March 19.—March takes its way through 
heavy days. Fatigue has clung to me with 
bands upon my heart, upon my lips, upon my 
throat, with sagging weight upon my feet. In 
how many hours has consciousness not been lost 
in all but a dull awareness of discomfort. 

Helplessly, reluctantly, sadly, spirit, mind 
and heart have drooped and failed, knowing 
no response save to the heavy tread of the 
hours, the dull going of the day, the intolerable 
airs of denial. 

In my room people have come and gone, 
leaving a trail of weariness. 

As there are words that can wound—even 
the strong know that—so there are thoughts 
that cancrush. ‘The sharpening of pain brings 
them to revelation, but their darkening must 
always be a potent thing, though their power 
remains unnamed. Little mean minds can 
trouble, for us, the beauty of the world. The 
stars and the mountains and the wide spaces 


58 IN THE SHADOW 


remain, but hearts have got entangled in dif- 
ferent reaches, and cannot answer. 

Now as I lie here—pierced by suffering and 
weakness—I am vividly aware of many affini- 
ties with dark, deep, far-falling glooms which — 
cling to my spirit as fatigue drags at my limbs. 
That strange lowering that silences the finer 
wires and denies their message to the mind— 
what is it? Is it that imprisoning will a 
vision-hour revealed to me? 

Self is always the same. It is not humanity, 
but a dark emanation from humanity. It is 
neither personality nor individuality, but a 
noisome fog, concealing both. 

One selfish person brings one into exactly 
the same atmosphere as another selfish person, 
taking a deadly sameness. ‘They all bear the 
same airs, they say the same things with a de- 
stroying repetition that holds never a surprise, 
never a renewal. And every self-sunk mood 
brings the same heaviness, the same thoughts, 
the same despondency. The wings of expres- 
sion fail in its clogging presence. It holds 
down every soaring thing. 

And amongst those many affinities that make 
our nature so intricate a fabric, a house of 


DNS er ESS HA DOW 59 


many stories, there dwells the little flame of 
choice that can say yes to any of them and must 
say yes to one—can climb with those that soar, 
can fall with those that sink. 

Surely here lies that strange mystery of in- 
terpretation, making of life so different a 
picture to one from another. Every high and 
low level of man’s great reach of affinity can 
claim its part in every experience, every event. 
He can choose what his eyes shall see. He 
can choose his heart’s response. He can build 
his life on his chosen level. 

So no heaviness, no darkness can convince 
me. I suffer under it, I do not believe in it. 
Its unreality is its cruelty. ‘he finer wires are 
silent, but they are there. The wings are 
folded, but they are not broken. My destiny 
is still a winged thing. The flame of choice 
that is the God-given soul in me owns no 
affinity with denial. Its element is endow- 
ment. I have known and I cannot forget. 
The true words quicken, only the false destroy. 
The real thoughts set free, they do not crush. 
If the seal of God’s promise is an ache of de- 
sire in my heart, the promise is my freedom. 
Hearts and hands go out—out—seeking re- 


60 IN THE SHADOW 


sponse, finding it on many levels. But if ever 
a heart has found a response in truth, it can 
never again forget. 

I think some great Spirit waits beside every 
event and every experience—as a good Advo- 
cate waits beside his client—to call and separ- 
ate the true, the beautiful, the hopeful, the 
eternal out of it—freeing the truth from error 
—freeing us from ignorance. 


April 2.—Thoughts lap my solitude like 
kindly seas about an ocean islet. I am not 
solitary while thoughts break upon my heart 
like waves that catch the light upon their 
spray. 

If once more I wandered in life’s ways, with 
thoughts and events together coming towards 
me, and this strange new light that has shone 
into my solitude bright upon both—surely in 
that union would be perfect joy and perfect 
love. 

But if once more I wandered in life’s ways, 
it would not be. “Thoughts and events would 
travel by different paths. A yawning chasm 
would separate them. ‘The Angel with the 
flaming sword forbids the Eden of their union. 

“When the thoughts of all men shall be 


IN THE SHADOW 61 


made manifest.’ ‘The words speak from my 
memory and answer my desire. Not, oh, 
thank God not, a rousing again of long-dead, 
fruitless warring of mind with mind, but a 
promise of a different day when life and ex- 
pression again are one—as the Word of God 
is One with God in the mystery of the Holy 
‘Trinity—and no longer the dark veil of mis- 
understanding hangs between soul and soul. 


April 15.—Easter has come and gone. 

Once Easter was a word that broke the 
winter stillness. After Easter came the lure of 
movement, wider spaces called, the year’s ad- 
ventures began. Summer waited, holding 
promises in a mist of possibility, like the mist 
of green on the budding woods. 

Now into my room Easter came—but with 
a different freedom—breaking a different 
winter. “Very early in the morning,” the 
lighted candles glowed against my grey walls, 
above the whiteness of lilies and hyacinths. 
The Dweller in Joy, white-clad, with moving 
hands, was there. I heard the piercing sweet- 
ness of sacramental words. I knew the holi- 
ness of Sacramental Presence enfolding my 
spirit. A moment of rapturous peace—a 


62 IN° THE SHADOW 


memory of eternity’s contact—this was my 
Faster. 

The whole Church spoke—just for one 
feeble, broken soul. The whole Church gave 
—to one for whom life has no more to give. 
Her mighty mystery—her infinite inspiration 
—were mine—as the sun’s whole glory shines 
for a single field flower. 

Once long ago—on the other side of the 
wide-cleft gulf of a year—when drawing- 
rooms were part of the common life and not 
strangely-remembered dreams, I met some one 
in a drawing-room, who spoke of things not 
often heard within drawing-room walls. It 
was a drawing-room in a boarding-house and 
others were there, but she spoke only for me. 
She seemed to know the answer to all the ques- 
tions that hurl their way through troubled 
minds when a hurt has sent all the blessed 
familiar thoughts hurtling out into nothing- 
ness. Disillusionment had filled my _ heart 
with questions, where sweet and blessed cer- 
tainties had dwelt before. 

“Tn every soul is a small sinless centre,’’ she 
said, ‘‘where sin and evil cannot come. It is 
the Garden of Eden. It is the Immaculate 
Conception. One soul can always reach an- 


IN THE SHADOW 63 


other soul there, but the beginning is by ways 
of the Spirit, for the life of the Spirit begins 
there. From there man commences the mas- 
tery of matter which is his privilege. From 
there man commences his union with God 
which is his destiny. Love impels us to noth- 
ing beyond the powers which are our privilege. 
When God gives us Himself He gives us 
everything.” 

Remembering those words that once con- 
soled a slighter sorrow, I find in them wisdom 
for a greater sorrow. 

I think that sacraments, and some things so 
deeply loved that love has made them sacra- 
mental, are real, not in their sweet and fleeting 
impression, but in a deeply hidden power, so 
that they become a secret treasure, to be ever- 
lastingly drawn upon for their slow, unending 
potency. I think they pierce a way, not to 
mind, nor senses, nor nerves, but to that ‘‘sin- 
less centre” increasing the life and energy hid- 
den there. So that the true life grows from 
in outward—mastering an ever-widening-circle 
of outward things. 


April 19.—A veil of green has been thrown 
over the tangle of brown branches I have 


64 IN THE SHADOW 


looked out upon all winter. The belts of gar- 
dens are at their loveliest. I can see a bridal 
mist of wild cherry blossom, mingling with the 
green. 

I watched, this morning, a wet dawn silver- 
ing the sky above the houses on the cliff. 
There were strange gleams on wet roofs—a 
diamond spark on wet skylights. The call of 
a blackbird broke the stillness. 

All day the buds have unfolded in mild, wet 
airs. [he high branches of the trees below 
my window brighten to emerald, so that an 
emerald mist fills half the window-space that 
has been colourless so long. When evening 
came I watched the lights spangle the twilight 
till all the green and grey was starred with 
gold. 

And all through the world spring’s magic 
is at work. Its green fire is running through 
many woods I know. It is quickening a hun- 
dred gardens that I love. Through them the 
birds are calling. The owls’ hoot crosses 
them. 

But not for me. Never again for me. 
Spring comes, but between me and spring is no 
meeting. Only an eternal parting, a rending 
as of heart from heart. 


IN THE SHADOW 65 


April 29.—When morning comes again, the 
first hope I can summon is the hope that when 
my tray is carried in, there will be a letter upon 
it. 

Letters are like people. There are some 
that can enter experience and change its 
rhythm with their entrance. And others leave 
one conscious of nothing but a vague sense of 
rebuff. 

But I think the post cards break my prison 
best. 

They come to me from many distances, fly- 
ing to me, like little winged things, from all 
over the world, calling my thoughts to meet 
them. And now New York is not further than 
a street in an English town, Benares is not 
more remote than a suburb of the city in which 
I dwell. 

Once pictures could tell me more than these 
pictures can ever tell. But the words written 
there bring more to me than words have ever 
brought before. ‘They can pierce a way where 
eyes have forgotten how to bear their mes- 
sage. 

Yet these little card pictures are all I can 
ever look to now to open for me those far, 
wide, wonder places of the world—each one a 


66 IN THE SHADOW 


tiny flame in my ignorance, like the spurt of a 
match in a dark room. 

Amongst the many, gathered fortuitously 
beside me, like an unbound book of memory 
and adventure, is one that has a place apart. 

It is a picture of Rome from the Pincian 
Hill. On a wide terrace in the foreground, 
where palms are growing, a solitary watcher 
stands, gazing over the panorama of Rome, so 
that my dimmed eyes can think they gaze upon 
it too, and dream of its magnificence, of that 
ascendant dome of great St. Peter’s, of the ten- 
der beauty of surrounding hills. 

Below the picture are written words by one 
whose grace has always been a vast self-forget- 
fulness and reverence before every gift of life. 
‘The figure is not mine, but I was just as 
contemplative.” 

In all the world there is no place can bring, 
as Rome brings, the conviction of garnered 
spiritual treasure, that humbling, mysterious 
sense of the penetration, through man, of se- 
crets beyond man—treasure too vast to seek 
out, too intricate to follow, too mighty to 
break up into knowledge. 

So the ultimate possession is the same for 
one from whom all life’s endowment is reced- 


IN THE SHADOW 67 


ing, as for one who finds himself facing wealth 
beyond grasp or knowledge. Contemplation 
has become the only union. So a single 
heightened hour in Rome’s eternal splendour 
answers the dim, uncounted days, in a narrow 
room where deprivation dwells, and confirms 
that faint, subtle-sweet delight that can still 
fill blinded eyes, crushed heart and empty 
hands, with the fulness of spirit’s joy. 


May 4.—Last night it seemed to me that my 
room and all the house about me dissolved in 
mist and I lay upon the night itself with all the 
immensity of the stars above me. Life had 
receded to an indescribable remoteness. So 
frail and failing seemed the threads that bound 
me to it, I could not conceive the possibility 
that they would ever draw me back to it again. 
My heart and mind and all my faculties seemed 
to pass from me into the immensity around me. 
From a deep, far distance I seemed to look 
back on the little incident of life that had clung 
to me so strangely for a moment. A faint 
wave of memory and regret brought but a 
vague, light touch upon my senses. Dimly I 
was conscious of a mist of flowers, a drift of 
dreams, a fragrance of friendship, a music of 


68 IN THE SHADOW 


poetry, a haunting of exquisite, garnered 
thought. These, out of life as it has yielded 
itself to me, my heart has held most gladly— 
these I have had to love—these have been all 
life’s sweetness to me. Out of that harvest 
ungathered, that union foregone, that deeper 
contact never to be mine—these have been the 
gifts of life to me. 

But morning came—to draw my soul back 
from its wanderings—back to accept the things 
it cannot love. Day waits—a blank canvas, 
upon which only my thoughts can write. 


May 6.—Still the days swing between light 
and darkness—the quiver of high things—the 
weight of affinities not yet silent. 

And there are still people who can come in 
and silence all the finer wires. ‘There are still 
the friends who can awaken them. I long, 
each day, to welcome those friends. ‘They be- 
long to that waiting, unseen, mysterious joy. 
I dread the entrance of the unknowing minds 
and destroying voices. 

Strange, bewildering, amazing experience 
creeps up and possesses my frame and masters 
the day—and they seek to control it, to negate 


IN THE SHADOW 69 


it, by a tinkling phrase, a weariness of petty 
words. 

They tell themselves it is the word it is well 
for me to hear. It is the last word it could be 
well for me to hear. It is the word that pro- 
tects them from knowing all that I know. It 
is a fence of phrase, a barrier of irritation, a 
determined denial—lest truth sweep in and 
banish all their ease. 

Does only pain, then, reveal the affinities 
that lie beyond ease? Is it only the crushing 
of the nearer affinities that calls them into life? 
Is this the true resurrection of the body? 

Then sorrow is from God. It is divine 
knowledge. It is the gate of vision. It is 
God’s promise of union with Himself. It is 
the unquenchable thirst of heart and soul and 
mind that tells us we wait for our true destiny. 
By sorrow we know the depths of life’s inade- 
quacy. We know our own incompleteness. 

I see each life on earth a footprint of God— 
the print of a foot strangely, poignantly 
pierced. 


May 12.—I am no longer in the little grey- 
walled room whose windows look out upon the 


70 IN THE SHADOW 


curving road to the city’s entrance, and into 
which, at noon, the sun’s rays beat directly. I 
have been brought to a different room, with 
wide windows looking northward—for so long 
called a guest-room that in it I feel myself 
something of a wayfarer, free from the bonds 
with which familiar things bind us to earth. 

The motors do not throw their light into 
this room, nor does the traffic pass below it. 
But in those nights when no clouds are in the 
sky, nor mists in the air, a gleam that is like 
the gleam of an elfin candle falls for a fleeting 
moment in a little bright patch on the wall— 
then vanishes—to come again and vanish. 
Across miles of city roofs that light travels to 
my room, shining from the revolving lamp of 
an island lighthouse. 

Summer is here—the long, warm days, the 
short, mysterious nights. I sleep and wake to 
lingering twilight, and sleep again and wake to 
daylight, and hours are yet to wait till morning 
though birds are twittering in ai ivy on the 
house-walls. 

Because this city rises and falls with the hills 
and valleys upon which it is set, I can look 
from my pillows over a wide stretch of sloping 
country, far enough to see, above the roofs and 


IN THE SHADOW a1 


gardens, the trees of distant woods and 
glimpses of an island sea and dim, blue hills 
beyond it. In a wide expanse of sky I can see 
the swifts and martins swoop. I can watch 
like a mighty pageant, the changing lights of 
dawn and noon and sunset, and the darkening 
of the night. 

Far away my high room sets me—far from 
those wide spaces of land and earth and sky— 
but not so far as that impelling weakness that 
fastens me, with its sharp piercings, to my 
loneliness. 


May 15.—In this big room my flowers are 
left beside me, when evening comes, to com- 
panion me through the night. I have shell-pink 
sweet peas, the first of the year, close at my 
side, and wonderful dark mauve tulips are 
bending from the mantel-shelf. Both were 
brought by one dear friend whose footsteps, 
through my weeks, are flowers, and I may fol- 
low that sweet trail, that is like the trail of her 
own love’s sweetness, between visit and visit. 
The scentless, lovely, distant things, with their 
strange, starry charm, that have no message 
for my senses now, have become the compan- 
ions of my spirit. ‘They are the work of the 


72 IN THE SHADOW 


perfect artist, veiling their message in beauty, 
holding, in time, some of the laughter of eter- 
nity. My room would be desolate without 

them. | 


May 24.—Outside the whole world lies in 
languorous heat. Not far away—oh, not far 
away—gardens are heavy with the scent of 
may-blossom, of lilac, of limes. Primroses 
star the woods. ‘There is lily of the valley in 
the hollows. Little streams are splashing un- 
der bending, new-leafed boughs. 

Once again, in fields I cannot see, the pop- 
pies flame. Once again the incense of white 
clover fills the air. 

Desire burns in my breast—a pain that kills 
—a fire that quickens. ‘The faintly flickering 
life in me kindles to passion. 

Oh, to go out—out into life once more—out 
into life’s ways—into the summer. Oh, to 
seek and gather life’s joys denied me—to 
find and hold the boons snatched from me 
before my hands could reach out and take 
them. 

Not far away—oh, not far away—under the 
languorous sun, wrapped in the summer scents 
and the humming summer air, all I desire is 


IN THE SHADOW 73 


and lives. All I can never have is yet there— 
with prodigal riches for other hands. The 
young corn and the poppies flame. Wild 
thyme is crushed under moving feet. Noon is 
strong and splendid. Remembered eyes, that 
never again can look into mine—under summer 
sunrays, in the scent of flowers—look into 
other eyes. But never again into mine, save 
in those dreams that break my heart in waking. 
Voices speak. Strong with invoking magic re- 
membered voices speak—but never again with 
magic for my heart, never again with music for 
my mind. 

In this tormenting sorrow of love and mem- 
ory—this anguish of desire for all I have been 
given heart and hands to hold, yet may not 
have, nor ever know again—lI long for bodily 
pain to blot the other anguish out, and possess, 
even with its fierce cruelty, this empty, frus- 
trate frame that now may know no other 
fulfilment. 


May 24.—Night comes and long hours lie 
between me and the fevered noon. 

In the sky is a still and wonderful beauty— 
black and purple clouds curtaining a gold and 
silver infinity. 


74 IN THE SHADOW 


The kindly gloom fills my room, my flowers 
shine in it—little ghostly presences. 

But not the night, nor the flowers, not the. 
silencing of voices, nor relief of solitude have 
called this deep stillness into my spirit. 

It is a deeper stillness than any night can 
bring. Thoughts shine in its shadows as pale 
flowers shine in dusky woods. 

Gone is the agony of separation—the fire of 
desire—the frustration of love and memory. 
The gathering darkness, the brooding stillness 
bring me life and union again. 

To all for whom the summer day has held 
the fulness of its joy, as for me—night comes 
—with separating touch—with imperious still- 
ness. 

For all, whom life endows and claims and 
gladdens, the greater night, that closes life 
itself with purpling shadows, waits—the great 
detachment—the transcending silence. 

I am not alone in sorrow and desire, in love 
and frustration—in longing that, each hour, 
beats up against denial. 

To all, in every hour of every day, life gives 
and takes away—life quickens and denies. 
There is no heart whose wishes do not fly out 


IN THE SHADOW 75 


beyond fulfilment—to return, and fall, and 
fail. 

Their unfulfilment is the witness of their 
destiny. 

In this hush of night and spirit—that en- 
folds me like a cherishing Life, with brooding 
gentle wings of love upon my soul—faith runs 
into my heart again. 

Once the primrose was mine. 

If I must be far away from it—and still far 
away even though my languid fingers touched 
it, still I can hold its memory in my heart and 
ponder that sweet message its beauty writes 
upon the earth for all to read. 

Once beloved eyes looked into mine. 

For God’s eternal purpose they looked into 
mine. I shall have that purpose through 
eternity. 

With the passing of the languorous day, 
from my heart has passed the fierceness of de- 
sire, and all the untrue, the foolish, and the 
wrong. 

I know the things that belong to my true 
destiny. I know they will be mine eternally. 

The world’s beauty pierces me and holds me 
to this cross of love and pain—that would not 


76 IN THE SHADOW 


be such pain but for the love that breaks my 
heart with memory and regret. Yet it is the 
piercing of union, not of separation. | 

The night is whispering her secrets to me in 
the deepening purple of her shadows. 

The primroses, the woods, the running 
waters, the heavy scents of flower-filled gardens 
all are far away. But near me is a touch 
closer than theirs—a fragrance sweeter wraps 
my spirit. 

Pain and longing have become as some great 
pressure that does not crush but raises—raises 
me into strange fragrances, strange possession, 
strange sorrow, stranger ecstasy. 


May 29.—The long summer days go past— 
a bitter-sweet possession. There are heavy- 
headed rose-peonies in my room and the cool 
green and white of Solomon’s Seal. 

From my far place on high-raised pillows I 
look over the wide land with the sunlight upon 
it—over to the far line of the hills beyond the 
inland sea, that wear the distance like a gar- 
ment of blue mist. 

Life out in the world, the life acknowledged 
to be life, seems as far away, as unreachable. 

I think, sometimes, that that life of doing, 


IN THE SHADOW 7 


seeing, planning, with uncounted things ready 
to run towards impulses and desires and an- 
swer them—and this life of hush and nothing- 
ness, where hours drift by to break like empty 
bubbles, and no answer can come to the little 
throb of wishes that beat all day—cannot both 
be real. A single world cannot hold both. A 
single frame cannot know both. One must be 
illusion. 

So wonderful it looks—that great majestic 
life that I may ponder, but may never have 
again—that if I died of a broken heart, re- 
gretting it—the tribute to its loveliness, its 
splendour and its poignancy would make the 
death worth while. My life would be yielded 
up to give assent to its desirability. 

But the life that I have is true. It is a life 
that the world has held since it held man. 

I cannot think of the long hospital wards, 
nor of remote, unknown sick-rooms—nor of 
crushed, sorrowing hearts that bear no out- 
ward sign of sorrow—and believe them to be 
but the failure of experience—the separation 
from reality—the falling from truth. 

All down the ages pain has had its own 
servants. 

Whatever that deep secret is, so strangely 


78 IN THE SHADOW 


held in the strange life of this planet, certain 
it is that some of its great mystery can only be 
told by pain. 


May 30.—I think that joy and sadness are 
like sun and rain. But the reality is in the sun 
and the joy; sadness and rain are but the serv- 
ants of its perfection. The garden is a real 
garden only in the sunshine (oh, the sodden 
sadness of a garden in the rain). The soul 
enters its true kingdom in joy; but in sorrow it 
has gathered its power to answer joy and its 
sensibility to recognise it. It has found its 
own beauty to match it. 

Last night—again—I woke in the hour that 
holds the short summer darkness—and that 
darkness was filled with joy. It met my in- 
most heart, as the darkness met my eyes. It 
drew me deeper and deeper into itself, and I 
knew that the joy of God holds all things 
within itself—and illness and desolation, si- 
lence and helplessness, are all included in it. 
Some day we shall find them in their true place 
—discords rearranged to harmonies. And 
they will be our heritage—they will be part of 
the Joy of God. 


Some time, mysteriously, Man’s will and 


IN THE SHADOW _ 79 


pleasure took God’s treasures to use them for 
himself—and finding them lifeless without 
God, drew upon Evil to give them life. And 
then, those treasures became—in Time—ter- 
rible.e We know them terrible upon our 
broken nerves. But some day God will take 
them back. Then again, they will be joy. As 
my dark hours are joy, when, mysteriously, 
that unimagined joy releases me, and all my 
fears are lost, and only love is real. 

Now, as I lie helpless, I think of all the 
beautiful, helpless things, hidden in every hu- 
man heart, bound under some hard fear that 
will not let them be free—and I am glad that 
love and pain are strong enough to break that 
fear. 


June 3.—Now again enters the month— 
once a month of pleasure—whose gifts and 
gladness last year failed me, for ever. It is 
the month that called me away from the open 
fields and the pleasure—into a dark room— 
to be told a dreadful secret. 

Very far away are now the fields and the 
festival. But I have not been in a dark room. 
The secret I have learnt is not a dreadful one. 
My footsteps cannot lead me towards life’s 


80 IN THE SHADOW 


open fields and pleasure places. But my 
thoughts can wing a wider way and reach re- 
moter distances than life’s great ways ever — 
opened tothem. There is a secret in my heart 
whose unfolding makes everything in all the 
universe my own. If the walls of a single 
room enclose me, those walls are set 


“In deep mid-silence, opendoor’d to God.” 


When my steps were free, and my seeking 
heart and hands directed them, I never sought 
such deep desires, such sweet fulfilment, such 
profound possession, as those that have en- 
tered, unsought, into my concealment to bless 
my helplessness. 

I believed there could be no deeper, better 
joy than the joy in nature, no profounder, nor 
nearer knowledge of God. I believed there 
could be no sweeter joy in love than the dear 
human love of touch and voice, and the magic 
of personality. Joy of nature left my tired 
heart. Nerves could no longer receive and 
answer it. And joy came to me, piercing and 
real, making the old joy dull and clumsy in 
comparison. I have known a far greater hu- 
man love—a remembered look—a _ sudden 
knowledge—an ineffable presence—come and 


IN THE SHADOW 81 


gone—reaching me across renouncement’s gulf, 
but, beyond look and touch an endowment— 
the piercing of eternity in love’s companion- 
ship. 

Could I go back and forget it? 

To lose it would be a greater loss than the 
loss I have already known. 

Dear as the earth life was, with dear re- 
sponse of heart to heart, of mood to mood— 
the response of spirit to spirit is dearer. 

The light behind the mystery grows so real 
I cannot believe I am the same person, who, a 
year ago, rebelled. 

A mysterious life flows in upon me. © 
Strangely, subtly, differently, it reaches me. 
Under it all I love and know changes, but with 
a change that is like the change of light, creep- 
ing upon the earth as night passes, changing 
the grey dawn to the ecstasy of sunrise. 

Not death, not denial dwell in my far room, 
but life and sweet assurance and knowledge 
quick with eternal wisdom. 


June 13.—This month knows no night. 
Day passes through an hour of silver twilight 
into day again. ‘The sundown lingers till the 
dawn appears. 


82 IN THE SHADOW 


There are roses in my room—crimson, yel- 
low and pink. Amongst the roses are the little 
green spears of rosemary. ‘They come from a 
suburban garden where flowers are often gath- 
ered for me, and whenever they are gathered 
the rosemary is cut and added to them, because 
I once revealed my love for it. Sometimes I 
fancy its pungence reaches even my remote- 
ness, though the roses stay far away. 

But the roses dream through the noons 
when pain crushes me—they wake and speak 
when pain leaves me and freedom comes again. 
Their beauty tells me what the breath of the 
rosemary bears to me. The early dawns 
speak the same language; the late sunsets write 
it on the sky. Sometimes a strange wisdom 
prints it straight upon my tired frame. From 
them all the same secret reaches me. It is the 
secret I left the festival to hear. It is the 
secret of joy. 

There are other witnesses. I meet the se- 
cret in printed words—in remembered poems 
—in Bible sayings—in beauty left on earth by 
work of man. I meet it sometimes in eyes 
that seek mine, and I wonder how those eyes 
caught its wisdom into their tenderness. I 
hear it in the hush and stillness of prayer—in 


IN THE SHADOW 83 


the music of sacramental words—in the mir- 
acle of sacramental Presence. I know it in 
the pure, wordless joy of rapturous certainties 
—of ecstatic adoration. I recognise it in the 
slow unclasping of dark and different, alien 
affinities—in the release from crushing bitter- 
ness. 

If once again I were well—there would be 
much to miss. If I left behind me all a single 
room has held, it would be more than I left to 
come to it. There are fires in this life for 
want of which the world might seem cold. 
‘‘Ah me, renunciation is not cold. It hath a 
flame. God knows it is not cold.” 


June 23.—Once—and in time, not very long 
ago—the mystery before me was the mystery 
of life. I did not knowit. I had not wisdom 
with which to anticipate it, save a garnering of 
dreams that wilted and failed when life’s airs 
touched them. I looked out at it, waiting for 
it in the unfolding of the days, my asking mind 
seeking every morning, every spring-tide, to 
know what it held for me. It clasped me 
close, reaching me in those apportioned ways, 
that often seemed to stay its fulness rather 
than invite it. Beyond those ways that were 


84 IN THE SHADOW 


my ways—what surged that I might not have, 
nor ever know? Dreadful things it held, but 
wonders too—and great and vast things that 
could sweep a small self away from all its 
anchors—into experience unimaginable—yield- 
ing the great dignity—the mysterious potency 
—of Life. 

Now I have been swept away from all my 
anchors. ‘The morning and the spring-time 
have revealed their gifts for me. A vast ex- 
perience has taken me into itself. ‘The little 
barriers, fencing the dreadful things, and, with 
those things fencing, often, life itself away, are 
shattered. ‘The great tides of Destiny have 
rushed upon them—and borne me away from 
careful hands—from the apportioned ways— 
from all the measures, the returns, the en- 
closures. 

And still I gaze out and wonder what day 
will bring me—what mystery, yet, is hidden 
from me behind the dark, concealing curtain 
that life itself has become. What vastness of 
destiny—what renewed experience waits to 
gather me into itself, and claim and win un- 
known response from me, when that last, 
wavering curtain fails and life—this life—fails 
with it? 


IN THE SHADOW 85 


There presses in upon me a sure confidence, 
a strange, near sweetness, unknown to life’s 
past spring-tides. 

Heart and will find their way across the 
misty barriers between life and life. Hope 
changes its aim and sends its shafts to pierce 
those mists. Beauty—charm—love itself go 
before me. I watch them go, and from the 
greater mystery beyond my vision I hear them 
call. I feel my own heart’s answer. 

Out of that vastness, in which my life is 
held, as the world around me is held, a shaft 
of love and knowledge, like a shaft of light, 
has pierced a way to me. 

It fastens the life I know to the life I have 
yet to know. It binds me to the life I 
have loved so well, while it is the path upon 
which I travel away from it. It shines before 
me but it shines behind me too. All I have 
loved is mine. Past love and knowledge 
were the gleams of this light’s leadings in 
my life. It is Life, as I have known and de- 
sired it—as I know and desire and pursue it 
still. 


June 29.—Morning comes. It is four 
o’clock. 


86 IN THE SHADOW 


A. matchless ecstasy of creeping dawn is 
stealing over sky and roofs. 

There is peace beyond peace, fulfilment be- 
yond fulfilment, content incomparable in its 
grey presence. 

Now I have a hunger in my heart towards 
that hidden, approaching, potent Mystery, 
greater than any desire I ever knew towards 
life. | 

Oh, heart of joy—oh, gladness beyond 
thought—might I capture it for ever and know 
it mine—pain then would be nothingness, 
would be but a passing jar of receding igno- 
rance, in face of this. What have my days 
become but God-given joy, when, at any sud- 
den, unlooked-for moment, I may wake and 
find myself in heaven? 

If I were free, what could I do with free- 
dom—but seek in all things the Joy that came 
to me in captivity? 

If it reached me in spoken words, or looked 
out upon me from beloved eyes, or if it sprang 
into my heart straight out of that vast mystery 
enfolding life, with never a channel of expe- 
rience to bear it to me, but only its sweetness 
in my spirit to convince me of it—it would yet 
be the same joy. It would be the supreme, 


IN THE SHADOW $7 


inevitable, transcending aim of the life that 
beats, beats in ceaseless desire within me. 

There would be nothing else in all the world 
to seek. 

All things that ever lured could only fall 
away or impede and trouble, confusing that one 
aim by clamant call upon affinities I only long 
to silence, now, for ever. 

I look no more to life for freedom. 

It would be captivity, not freedom, when, 
with every dawn I know, the bonds that hold 
me are snapping one by one. 

Heart — hands — thoughts — desires — 
aresiree: 

Oh, Freedom of Eternity—endowment of 
All. What piercing pain matters so that free- 
dom comes? 

Not I, but the bonds that hold me, are 
pierced. 














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